


f-stop

by Nightdog_Barks



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Alternate Universe, Deception, Espionage, Friendship, Love, Photographs, Russia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-03
Updated: 2010-08-03
Packaged: 2017-10-18 07:47:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/186575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightdog_Barks/pseuds/Nightdog_Barks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"I hear the weather in Moscow's beautiful this time of year."</i>  Story and epilogue, 2,059 words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	f-stop

**Title:** _f-stop_  
 **Author:** [](http://nightdog-barks.livejournal.com/profile)[**nightdog_barks**](http://nightdog-barks.livejournal.com/)  
 **Characters:** House, Wilson, mention of an OMC and OFC. Gen.  
 **Rating:** G  
 **Warnings:** None.  
 **Spoilers:** Yes, spoilers for the end of Season 6.  
 **Summary:** _"I hear the weather in Moscow's beautiful this time of year."_ Story and epilogue, 2,059 words.  
 **Disclaimer:** Don't own 'em. Never will.  
 **Author Notes:** This fic was very obviously sparked by a current event -- the real-life [Anna Chapman spy story](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chapman). There are a few notes at the end; the epilogue is by [](http://blackmare-9.livejournal.com/profile)[**blackmare_9**](http://blackmare-9.livejournal.com/). LJ-cut text is from the song "Life During Wartime," by the Talking Heads.  
 **Beta:** My intrepid First Readers, with especial thanks to [](http://blackmare-9.livejournal.com/profile)[**blackmare_9**](http://blackmare-9.livejournal.com/) and [](http://pwcorgigirl.livejournal.com/profile)[**pwcorgigirl**](http://pwcorgigirl.livejournal.com/).

  
 **  
_f-stop_   
**

  
Much to House's disappointment, the lobby of the FBI field office in Newark, New Jersey is virtually indistinguishable from all the other lobbies of all the other government bureaucracies he's ever been in. Aside from the DMV, which is its own special circle of Hell. Corporate drones scurry about, and except for the fact that they're probably all carrying, they look and act like all other corporate drones anywhere. The carpeting is an inoffensive taupe, elevators to the other floors of the tower come and go against the far wall, and in the center of the lobby is a round reception desk, with a round receptionist and a couple of uniforms behind it. House wonders what would happen if he walked up to the desk and asked the receptionist to page Benedict Arnold, but only for a moment. There's no need -- Wilson is there, slumped in one of a row of waiting chairs. He doesn't look up as House approaches.

"Hey," House says. "I hear the weather in Moscow's beautiful this time of year."

A muscle in Wilson's jaw tightens, but he keeps doing what he's doing, which is thumbing through his open wallet. House waits a minute, but Wilson is ignoring him and House's leg is beginning to hurt from the drive in I-95 traffic, so he sits down next to Wilson.

"Making sure everything's here," Wilson mumbles, although House hasn't asked him anything. "They were pretty ... thorough."

House considers asking _how_ thorough but decides it's a bad idea -- he'd have to listen to Wilson in agitated-hamster mode all the way back to Princeton. Instead, he watches the clean-cut drones go about their business of protecting the nation.

"Huh," Wilson says. His hands have stopped moving. House looks over. He's holding a narrow strip of paper, a series of small black and white photographs, the kind snapped in an old-fashioned photo booth frequented by tourists on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Tourists ... or lovers.

"Huh," Wilson says again. He's staring at the strip of photos, at himself and the beautiful young woman in them. The woman's hair is dark in the greyscale snapshots, an interesting contrast to the vibrant redhead House knows. Knew. "Wonder why they didn't take these," Wilson says. "They took everything else." He holds the strip closer, as if looking for an answer.

"Maybe because they already had her passport photo?" House says. "And don't forget all those surveillance tapes."

Wilson's hands drop; he closes his eyes and shakes his head. "House," he says. "My car's impounded, I've answered more questions than were on my MCAT and boards combined, and my girlfriend turns out to be a Russian spy. Could you please just give me a ride home?"

"No," House says. Wilson looks at him, startled. "Your condo's a crime scene," House points out. "I think they're looking for secret rooms. Shortwave radios. Microfilm in the cookie jar."

Wilson's shoulders slump even further. "Okay," he says. "A hotel, then. There's a Marriott -- "

"I have a better idea," House says. He levers himself out of his chair. "Come on," he says. "We'll grab some pizza, have a few beers, you can tell me all about how you and Vera Chaplin planned to revolutionize the masses. Or is that lobotomize the masses? I can never remember."

* * *

"There were twelve others," Wilson moans. He's gone from sullen silence to talkative drunk in record time, and the greasy pizza box on the coffee table holds a quarter-moon of pepperoni pie. Wilson had wolfed down most of it -- not a surprise, House thinks, considering he's probably been trapped in small rooms all day with government food, contractually obligated to be dry and tasteless.

"That's what Agent Hazlitt said," Wilson continues. "Most of 'em were from Saint Petersburg. Some of 'em had _families here!_ " He wipes a bead of condensation from his bottle. "I was going to ask her to marry me," he snuffles.

House rolls his eyes. The crack of a bat from the TV announces another run for the Marlins. He'd had CNN on, but their entire broadcast had been _breaking news_ on _the spy who loved me_ story.

"It doesn't make sense," he mutters. "It's not like you know any state secrets. You're paying too much alimony to make blackmail worthwhile." He glares at this conundrum of Wilson, but Wilson has his red-rimmed eyes fixed on the TV.

"John said," Wilson says, "they think maybe it was a ... a rogue op." He blinks, then keeps going. "One of the ... spies, they were asking about green technology. Solar tiles, on 'lectric cars. Another one ... another one was engaged to an agronomist. He studied ... _wheat_. So they were all, all over the place."

"Who's John?" House asks.

Wilson hiccups. "John Hazlitt. Field Agent Hazlitt. Special Agent _in Charge_ Hazlitt."

If House hadn't already rolled his eyes, he'd roll them again. Just like Wilson to _bond_ with his interrogator.

"Tell me again how you two met?"

"Well, I had an early call this morning, early early, an' John -- "

"Not the FBI," House says. _"Vera."_

"Oh. She was ... she was a friend. Of somebody's. At a party. Beatrice. Cuddy's interior ... interior designer." He turns wide, puppy-bright eyes on House. "I already told John all this."

"And now you're telling me," House says. He's stopped paying attention to the game a while ago; this is way more interesting than the hapless Mets losing again. In his experience, Wilson is most often a _happy_ drunk, content to fall down a flight of stairs or slug body shots from between a stripper's cleavage. Sometimes, though, on rare, very rare occasions, Wilson loses his pants on a long walk home. This is one of those (metaphorically speaking) pantsless times, and House will humor it for all he's worth instead of doing what he usually does, namely squashing Wilson's exposed mushy heart like the pathetic thing it is.

"So she caught you on the rebound," he says.

 _"No!_ I mean ... maybe. Okay, maybe she did." Wilson looks away. "I thought Sam and I were gonna make it this time."

And the ashes from that crash-and-burn had still been warm when Wilson had shown up with Vera, actually _bringing her_ to _meet House_ , standing at House's open door and introducing her. Vera Chaplin, _née_ Vera Koznyshev, Chaplin by way of a short marriage to Alan and a friendly British passport. He'd said something in his careless Russian and she'd answered, smiling, and he'd seen in that moment what Wilson had seen. She'd moved into Wilson's condo the next day.

Wilson seems to have covered the same ground in his own memory, for the next thing he says is, "There was a position opening up in the ... the NCI. She wanted us to move to Bethesda."

"And?" House picks a stray slice of black olive from the leftover pizza and swallows it down.

"And?" Wilson squints at his now-empty bottle as if he could refill it by force of imagination alone. "And I was gonna _go_." He looks blearily around the apartment. "I mean ... Bethesda's not _that_ far away. An you ... you're with Cuddy now, so."

"What happens to Mata Hari?"

That muscle in Wilson's jaw tenses again, but after a moment Wilson just sighs and scrubs at his face with his hands.

"Vera's being deported," he says. "Some kind of ... of _spy swap_ with the Russian government." And that _should_ be the end of it, but apparently it's not, because then Wilson says, "They let me say goodbye to her."

"And _that's_ when she slipped you the microfilm," House says. "Admit it!" The sooner he can get Wilson to throw something, the sooner they can both go to bed. Wilson, however, isn't going to let him off that easily, and so he meanders on for another half-hour, his voice getting progressively softer as he drifts closer to sleep. So soft, in fact, that House barely hears his last, mumbled words.

"But we're ... we're okay ... " And trailing away, something that sounds like "right?"

" _Da_ , Comrade," House says, but Wilson isn't listening.

House sits there for a while until he decides the only thing more pathetic than a forty-something-year-old guy sleeping it off is a fifty-something-year-old guy watching him. He pushes himself up from the sofa to get a blanket, but stops, distracted by the strip of photos on the table.

It's a six-photo set, glossy black and white with thin black borders dividing the tiny portraits. So, not Atlantic City -- House knows the place in the East Village, a bar with a vintage photo-booth where patrons can draw the curtain and pretend they're inhabiting the same _film-noir_ world of Humphrey Bogart and Orson Welles. Stacy had dragged him there once, and he'd spent the entire six shots glaring at the camera as she'd tried to get him to smile.

The strip has a crease in the center; he remembers Wilson taking it out of his wallet again, gazing at it with goofy mooncalf eyes before tossing it and his wallet on the coffee table. House thinks about getting his reading glasses and decides not to bother -- the subject matter is obvious. Smiles and kisses, rainbows and unicorns, the usual happy horseshit a couple imagines for their joined futures, and all about to come crashing down. Wilson should know by now it never lasts.

House looks at the photos for a long moment, then folds the last one over at the seam, back and forth, opening and re-folding, sharpening the new crease with his thumbnail until he can carefully tear it free. He reinserts the shortened strip into Wilson's wallet, then tugs his own from his jeans pocket and tucks the single photo away, concealing it behind a triple threat -- a bail bondsman's card, a VIP pass to the "Fine Arts" viewing room at the Fox's Whiskers, and a neon-pink foil packet containing a glow-in-the-dark bubble-gum-flavored condom. Only then does he make his way to the hallway closet and pull the spare blanket from the top shelf.

He shakes it open and allows it to settle over Wilson -- it smells now, faintly, of small child, but Wilson's only response is to sigh and burrow a little deeper into the sofa. House watches for a moment, but Wilson doesn't move again, not even when House clicks off the TV and silence fills the room. His leg is starting to ache.

 _"Spo'koinoi 'nochi_ , Wilson," House says, but softly because the sudden silence seems to demand it. After another moment he goes to bed, and when he dreams, it's in a language not his own.

  
 ** _Overexposure_**  
Epilogue by [](http://blackmare-9.livejournal.com/profile)[**blackmare_9**](http://blackmare-9.livejournal.com/)

  
She'll probably never know how they found out, which strand of the spider's web they first touched, and then tugged.

Or how much more aware, and wary, she might have been if James hadn't made her feel too good to pay attention the way she once would have done.

She moves her hand through the air in front of her, watching the shadows of holding-cell bars glide across her fingers like water. Her thoughts, her dreams are in English now. It has been this way for years.

After so much time, it wasn't the FBI whose insights she feared, and it certainly wasn't the SVR, her own people having seemed to long since forget about her. Nor had she been afraid of James, who took everything she said as true, which most of it was. Her lies to him were lies of omission, only.

All the lies except for one: she did not want to move to Bethesda. Princeton was her home and it was his home, too. To ask him to leave it was the most selfish thing she had done in the time since her people dropped the reins and let her wander.

And she had wandered into the warm arms of an American doctor, and then he took her to meet his dearest friend.

Greg House spoke Russian to her, and looked her in the eye, and Vera knew. Enough time, enough proximity, and he would find her out; too much distance, and James would never go. Bethesda was the halfway house, farther than she wanted to go but not as far as she would have, to keep herself and James safe from the truth.

She'd have lived on that middle ground forever.

  
~ fin

 _A Few Notes:_  
One of the spies was indeed interested in green technology and the transition to a post-oil economy, at least as reported in [The Washingtonian](http://www.washingtonian.com/blogarticles/16273.html). The "engaged to an agronomist" is my invention.  
The "place in the East Village" [is real](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/arts/14expl.html?pagewanted=all), although it's much more likely they've got a four-shot machine rather than a six.  
The actual FBI press releases on the spy story may be found [here](http://newyork.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/nyfo062810a.htm) and [here](http://newyork.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel10/nyfo070810a.htm).  
Lots of interesting photobooth history [here](http://www.photobooth.net/).  
My attempt at transliterated Russian is from an online [Russian travel guide](http://www.waytorussia.net/WhatIsRussia/Russian/Part2.html). *g*

  



End file.
